Which linguist had previously observed consonant correspondences before Jacob Grimm formulated Grimm’s law?

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The Brothers Grimm — Brothers Grimm Jacob (right) and Wilhelm Grimm, oil portrait by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1855; in the National-Galerie, Berlin.

The Danish linguist Rasmus Rask had previously observed the regularity of consonant correspondences between Germanic and other Indo-European languages before Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm’s law.12

In 1818, Rask demonstrated that consonant sounds in Germanic languages varied with a specific regularity from their equivalents in other Indo-European languages, such as the relationship between the English father and acre and the Latin pater and ager. While Rask’s observations provided the foundation for this principle, it was Jacob Grimm who later enunciated the law in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37), establishing it as a fundamental concept in comparative linguistics.21